Well, 3 more weeks until the Google+ app gets removed from my phone (by me, by the power of Root) when they shut it down, just as Google shuts down so many of their services suddenly.

Not that I'll hugely miss it, but Google+ has been a comparatively nice, calm feed compared to the firehose of text-bites that is Twitter and the even-creepier-than-Google surveillance platform that is Faecebook.

Stephen Ward (AukonDK): G+ used to be my first pinned tab. It's been a shame to see the posts in my news feed dry up until only a few automatic blog postings are left.

Reddit is the only place I regularly visit now for G+ sort of stuff but that's for following communities rather than people.

I'm finally getting around to getting the HTML5 Audio Format Test page some of the updates it's been needing. "WebMv2" (i.e. opus-in-webm) has been added as a test format (alongside the original vorbis-in-webm), and the recordings for .mp3 and .flac have been updated to reflect new developments this year.

Now if I could find a way to mux opus into Apple's special "core audio format", I could put up an opus sample that the most recent Apple devices are supposed to be able to support... (FFMPEG supports the opus codec and supports "core audio file" format...but still doesn't yet support muxing opus into .caf. Dangit.)

I finally have a new episode in the Hacker Public Radio queue again for the first time in, likem far too unreasonably long.

I'm especially interested in what anyone else who has ever turned an underpowered computer into a Linux-based "appliance" (or has just wanted to) thinks of it. Everyone else, too, of course, but since it's really a "Make A Linux Appliance" tutorial there's an obvious bias...

"Opus is on the backlog with high priority" ("Roadmap priority: High — We intend to begin development soon.")

Just...wow. Microsoft really DOES seem to be improving.

Only complaint - all the audio files I find are .ogg, but so far the only relevant container format that Microsoft has in active development is "webm", which has awful metadata format by comparison in my opinion. Still, if I have to settle for "webm audio" with opus to get legally-free audio on the web rather than .opus, I'll cope.

It's kind of obscene how much of a hassle it was to figure out how to get bluetooth and pulseaudio to work properly off of a headless machine.

Finally got the bluetooth speaker playing .opus files off of the headless netbook successfully now, though. The real question is whether I'll be able to remember the way to navigate the mess next time I want to get it working...